The average time required to play a major-league baseball game continues to hover just under three hours; the average game in 2009 took two hours and 55.4 minutes. On one Saturday afternoon in 1910 at Ponce de Leon Park, the Atlanta Crackers and Mobile Sea Gulls demonstrated how quickly a baseball game can be played.

The Braves dominated their division during the 1990s, but they are only a small part of Atlanta's long and storied baseball history. During the days of segregation, the Atlanta Black Crackers made it to the big time in the Negro Leagues between 1919 and 1949.

Floyd County, Georgia, in the northwest corner of the state, once supported eight different textile mills, each with a baseball team composed of mill workers. These teams became the formally organized Northwest Georgia Textile League and flourished between the 1930s and 1950s, providing Floyd County with three decades of industrialized community recreation that has not been rivaled since.

During the first years of the twentieth century many of the most celebrated—and marketable— major leaguers supplemented their incomes by headlining in vaudeville or touring in legitimate plays during the off-season. As one of the biggest names in baseball, Ty Cobb was an immediate star on the stage.

As the last National League player to bat .400 in a season, Bill Terry is best remembered for racking up hits for the New York Giants. But in 1915 in the Georgia-Alabama League, he showed he could also be good at preventing them, too.